Well Blow Me Down Up: MechWarrior Online Launches

Robots! They walk among us. Admittedly, they’re not particularly inconspicuous about it, given that they are both GIANT and in possession of a decently hefty marketing budget that allows them to plaster websites with megaton banner ads and titanic, lavishly produced trailers. It’s almost like they want us to know that they’re stomping about, tracking rust and guts all over everything – even the new carpet (!). I guess MechWarrior Online has “launched” now or something, so I suppose that makes sense. It’s looking snazzy, but its community has been in a state of open warfare with developer Piranha for the past few months due to a lack of communication and direction changes that don’t align with what many players spent money on. But hey, at least Piranha is restricting the perhaps too-casual-friendly third-person viewpoint a little bit. That’s something, right?

MechWarrior Online is, of course, free-to-play, so you can go clomp onto the frontlines right this very second. Well, after a fairly sizable download, anyway.

For those among you’ve been putting on your pants one nuclear tank life support system at a time since your friends were riding big wheels, this patch might not be what you’re looking for. That said, the patch notes do bring some good news – even if it’s largely correcting for previous bad news. The third-person camera is now disabled in 12-player competition matches, which is nice because many players felt like it provided an unfair advantage over first-person.

Other changes are more house-keepy in nature, with new trial mechs, balance rejiggering, and bug fixes rounding out the bulk of the bullet points. Piranha, meanwhile, noted that MWO is a very long ways off from complete. “There is plenty of work still on our plate and we are not going to stop till every feature is in your hands.” On the upside, a recent note from the dev team suggested that includes UI 2.0, Community Warfare, and Clans. That said, all of those things sound pretty early at this point.

How is everyone finding MWO so far? Has Piranha strayed too far into arcade-y territory? Or are the foundations solid and simply in need of a strong metagame to tie everything together?